April 3, 2011 -- Perhaps the reason people on the left are so upset with Juan Cole and
Gilbert Achcar’s “humanitarian intervention” arguments is that they are
widely considered “one of us”. In Achcar’s case, the pain is even more
acute for the Marxist wing of the left since his credentials are so well
established.

Turning first to Juan Cole, we are operating on a plane fairly far
removed from the Marxist literature on such matters. Whatever his
position, he must be commended for sticking his neck out as a public
intellectual. His blog article “An Open Letter to the Left on Libya”
has 356 comments, including his own responses. Could you imagine
Samantha Powers ever engaging with her critics in this way when she was
at Harvard?

Cole begins with a trip down memory lane:

I can still remember when I was a
teenager how disappointed I was that Soviet tanks were allowed to put
down the Prague Spring and extirpate socialism with a human face. Our
multilateral world has more spaces in it for successful change and
defiance of totalitarianism than did the old bipolar world of the Cold
War, where the US and the USSR often deferred to each other’s sphere of
influence.

Clearly, Cole is missing the main point. If the disappearance of the
USSR makes it easier for the United States to intervene, the only outcome that is
guaranteed is a unipolar Empire of the sort that Queen Victoria
ruled over. If Queen Victoria was committed to “human rights” in the
Sudan, including the very same sorts of issues that George Clooney,
Nicholas Kristof and Mia Farrow get worked up over today, why would we
expect the US imperialists to behave any differently? Their
interest is never about stopping human rights abuses but broadening
their global reach.

Like Achcar, Cole does make some very good arguments against the MRZine/Cockburn/Chossudovsky wing of the left:

The libel put out by the dictator, that
the 570,000 people of Misrata or the 700,000 people of Benghazi were
supporters of “al-Qaeda,” was without foundation. That a handful of
young Libyan men from Dirna and the surrounding area had fought in Iraq
is simply irrelevant. The Sunni Arab resistance in Iraq was for the most
part not accurately called ‘al-Qaeda,’ which is a propaganda term in
this case. All of the countries experiencing liberation movements had
sympathizers with the Sunni Iraqi resistance; in fact opinion polling
shows such sympathy almost universal throughout the Sunni Arab world.
All of them had at least some fundamentalist movements. That was no
reason to wish the Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians and others ill. The
question is what kind of leadership was emerging in places like
Benghazi. The answer is that it was simply the notables of the city. If
there were an uprising against Silvio Berlusconi in Milan, it would
likely unite businessmen and factory workers, Catholics and secularists.
It would just be the people of Milan. A few old time members of the Red
Brigades might even come out, and perhaps some organized crime figures.
But to defame all Milan with them would be mere propaganda.

Unfortunately, he undermines the credibility gained with such solid arguments when he refers to Qaddafi [Gaddafi] as follows:

The implications of a resurgent, angry
and wounded Mad Dog, his coffers filled with oil billions, for the
democracy movements on either side of Libya, in Egypt and Tunisia, could
well have been pernicious.

It would be a good idea for the left never to refer to Qaddafi as a
“mad dog” considering the origins of this epithet. At an April 9, 1986,
news conference, US President Ronald Reagan stated: “Well, we know that this mad dog of the
Middle East has a goal of a world revolution, Moslem fundamentalist
revolution, which is targeted on many of his own Arab compatriots.”

Cole is also rather disingenuous in the way he finds legitimacy in an
intervention that was not even approved by Congress (Dennis Kucinich, a
creature that I would describe as invertebrate generally, has called
for Obama’s impeachment):

The intervention in Libya was done in a
legal way. It was provoked by a vote of the Arab League, including the
newly liberated Egyptian and Tunisian governments. It was urged by a
United Nations Security Council resolution, the gold standard for
military intervention.

It is doubtful that anybody can take the idea that the Egyptian and
Tunisian governments are “liberated” seriously. Right now the army holds
power in Egypt and in Tunisia, the prime minister was appointed by the
dictator Ben Ali’s unelected successor. This is not to speak of the role
of Saudi Arabia in tilting the Obama administration toward
intervention. You can be sure that Saudi Arabia has not yet been
“liberated”, not even on the highly qualified basis of Egypt and
Tunisia. Asia Times’s Pepe Escobar reports:

You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar
Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck
between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two
diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that
Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead
for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement
in their neighbor in exchange for a “yes” vote by the Arab League for a
no-fly zone over Libya – the main rationale that led to United Nations
Security Council resolution 1973.

This does not sound very much like the high-minded principles that
are taught in Ivy League international relations seminars but more like The Godfather part one or HBO’s The Sopranos.

Cole tries to refute the arguments Marxism traditionally rests on against intervention by making a rather specious case:

Leftists are not always isolationists. In
the US, progressive people actually went to fight in the Spanish Civil
War, forming the Lincoln Brigade.

In fact, this has about as much to do with a NATO no-fly zone as
Obama has to do with Paul Robeson. However, there is a point that is
worth taking up and that is whether “outsider” interference is always
wrong. I will address that after a look at the case made by Gilbert
Achcar.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was indeed a
compromise with the imperialists, but it was a compromise which, under
the circumstances, had to be made. … To reject compromises ‘on
principle’, to reject the permissibility of compromises in general, no
matter of what kind, is childishness, which it is difficult even to
consider seriously … One must be able to analyze the situation and the
concrete conditions of each compromise, or of each variety of
compromise. One must learn to distinguish between a man who has given up
his money and fire-arms to bandits so as to lessen the evil they can do
and to facilitate their capture and execution, and a man who gives his
money and fire-arms to bandits so as to share in the loot.

Unfortunately, this treaty had little to do with the immediate
question of an imperialist intervention in Libya. Frankly, there is
little in Marxist literature that deals directly with such a matter
since it is a phenomenon that only really began to take form long after
Lenin’s death. We are dealing with various forms of “rescue” that
combine multinational structures like the UN or NATO, or temporary
coalitions with a veneer of legality, with powerful military assets,
especially cruise missiles. Over and over again, we see operations like
Kosovo, East Timor, and now Libya that follow a well-trodden path. The
West intervenes to prevent “genocide” or massacres. The closest analogy,
at least from a propaganda standpoint, is with Hitler’s genocides but
it only works with East Timor.

Gilbert is right, revolutionaries have sometimes been prepared to take help from imperialist powers.

Soon after the Russian Revolution of
1917, invading German armies were threatening the survival of the infant
Soviet republic. Britain and France offered help. Lenin wrote to the
Bolshevik central committee: “Please add my vote in favour of taking
potatoes and weapons from the Anglo-French imperialist robbers.” (The
citation: The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee
Minutes of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks)
August 1917-February 1918 (London, 1974), p. 215)

But I don’t find this analogy very useful, or one that I have heard
on Marxmail, namely that of Lenin coming to Russia on a German train. If
you are going to use an analogy, it has to be much closer to the
problem under consideration.

Ironically, Achcar’s trump card is one that makes his connection to the Trotskyist movement tenuous at best:

To take another extreme analogy for the
sake of showing the full range of discussion: could Nazism be defeated
through non-violent means? Were not the means used by the Allied forces
themselves cruel? Did they not savagely bomb Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, killing huge numbers of civilians? In hindsight, would we
now say that the anti-imperialist movement in Britain and the United
States should have campaigned against their states’ involvement in the
world war?

Ernest Mandel’s analysis of WWII
holds up rather well against this line of reasoning that so many of us
Trotskyist veterans who heard it from CPers in the 1960s and '70s but
again from Christopher Hitchens during the wars in the Balkans and in
Iraq.

I think that there must be a different way of evaluating situations
such as that which confronts us now in Libya. The real problem is in
determining the nature of the Libyan revolt that now has been condemned
by the “anti-imperialists” as ex post facto counter-revolutionary
because of Western intervention. In this schema, Qaddafi is
“anti-imperialist” because Western jets are bombing his troops. I posed
this question on Mike Ely’s Kasama Project but have not gotten any
takers:

Just a hypothetical example but not that
far from what happened. Let’s say that the Australian army encountered
serious resistance from Indonesian militias trying to hold on to East
Timor and that the East Timorese had been armed by the US. Would we
support the Indonesian militias?

If Cole and Achcar err on the question of understanding the nature of
the beast, their opponents in this debate err on the side of demonising
the men and women who took up arms against Qaddafi. By harping on CIA
involvement with the rebels, they essentially reduce the opposition to
something akin to the Nicaraguan contras or Savimbi’s killers in Angola.
While I think both sides will outlive any errors (MRZine of course
being excepted) made in this debate, neither has shown their best side.

Finally, although I oppose “humanitarian interventions” by the
imperialists, I do think that outside rescues can play a role. When
Tanzanian troops entered Uganda to topple Idi Amin, this was a genuine
humanitarian intervention all the more so since the murdering tyrant was
receiving outside support from guess who:

The same Gaddafi is said to have urged
Idi Amin to declare himself as Life President and Amin did so but with
dreadful consequences. Amin had to be removed from power by force. When
his regime’s doomsday finally arrived in 1979, Amin’s dreaded State
Research Bureau, or ‘superior’ army equipped to the tooth with MIGs,
tanks, missiles, artilleries, and backed up by constant supplies from
Godfather Gaddafi, became utterly useless.

Actually, Libyans fought side by side
with Amin’s soldiers. 2,500 Libyan troops sent to aid Amin were equipped
with T-54 and T-55 tanks, BTR APCs, BM-21 Katyusha MRLs, artillery, Mig
21s and a Tu-22 bomber, but they were easily defeated by the better
organized combined Ugandan-Tanzanian forces commanded by David Oyite
Ojok, Tito Okello and Yoweri Museveni.

The anti-anti-Qaddafi left

By Louis Proyect

April 1, 2011 -- The Unrepentant Marxist -- First of all, I want to do a little bit of a Maoist self-criticism
and admit that I was wrong in predicting that there would be no
imperialist intervention in Libya. Clearly, a Nostradamus I am not.

My mistake, looking back in retrospect, was assuming that there was
no need to invade since there was no driving economic need. Unlike
Venezuela, Libya had long ago thrown its doors open to imperialist
penetration. This led me to believe that imperialism would not
intervene. Now there are some who insist that this is an oil war just as
was the case in Iraq (leaving aside the question of how little
control/ownership the USA exercises there now.) For example, Noam
Chomsky told Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert in a recent ZNet interview:

Libya is rich in oil, and though the US
and UK have often given quite remarkable support to its cruel dictator,
right to the present, he is not reliable. They would much prefer a more
obedient client. Furthermore, the vast territory of Libya is mostly
unexplored, and oil specialists believe it may have rich untapped
resources, which a more dependable government might open to Western
exploitation.

Chomsky, who has always had a remarkable gift for finding material in
the bourgeois press to support his arguments, somehow did not bother to
find evidence about Western anxiety over Qaddafi who by the above
description appears to be another Chavez, or worse.

Searching for “Libya” and “American oil companies” in Lexis-Nexis
between the dates 2004 and 2010 presented an entirely different picture
from that drawn by Chomsky. One off the top states:

Is Libya the new Iraq? When Petroleum
Intelligence Weekly, an influential energy industry newsletter, posed
that question recently in a comparison of investment opportunities in
both countries, the answer was clear.

A vanguard of American lawyers, bankers
and consultants, many of them based in Houston, has traveled to Tripoli
in recent weeks to evaluate Libyan opportunities. Many of these visitors
are focused on expectations that Libya plans to offer as many as 11 new
oil exploration blocks this month to foreign companies, in the first
opening of the nation’s oil fields available to Americans since the
early 1980′s.

”The risks of entering Libya now are relatively low, in terms of politics and getting to the oil,”
said Stephen Davis, co-head of the Middle East and North Africa section
of Vinson & Elkins, a Houston law firm that is handling much of its
Libya business through a new office in Dubai. ”There’s really nothing
quite like it, since the terrain is already familiar to many American
companies.”

The New York Times, July 20, 2004

I would think that a lawyer from Houston would know what he is talking about, right?

If you began studying events in Libya from March 1 onwards, you would
get the impression that the armed opposition to Qaddafi was a wholly
owned subsidiary of US imperialism, like the Nicaraguan contras or
the gusanos who were defeated at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba.
Without a no-fly zone, we are led to believe, these enemies of progress
would have gotten nowhere.

But if you are willing to look at news reports from day one, the
pattern was clear. By late February, without any air support and without
any CIA training, the ragtag volunteer army from the east had Tripoli
in its sights:

The popular uprising against Moammar
Kadafi expanded into an oil-rich area of western Libya long considered
one of his strongholds, leaving the long-time leader increasingly
isolated and in danger of encirclement as he fights for survival.

Calm was returning to a stretch of
eastern Libya that has been seized by the opposition. Residents were
restoring basic services in the country’s second-largest city, Benghazi,
and setting up informal governing structures.

“The uprising is over. Eastern Libya has
all fallen from Kadafi’s power,” said Ashraf Sadaga, who helps oversee a
mosque in the coastal city of Derna.

At a rally there, one young man held up a sign addressing Kadafi: “The people have dug your grave,” it said.

But reports painted a grim picture of
western Libya. Terrified residents of the capital, Tripoli, said
pro-government militias rampaged through some residential areas, firing
automatic weapons from pickup trucks and Land Cruisers.

The fall of Misurata, Libya’s
third-largest city, which is a little more than 100 miles east of
Tripoli, as well as a smaller town in the far west meant that the
rebellion inspired by revolts in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt now spans
nearly the length of the country.

Crowds fought loyalists in Sabratha, about 40 miles west of Tripoli.

The opposition also claimed control of
Zuwarah, about 30 miles from the border with Tunisia in the west, after
local army units sided with the protesters and police fled.

Kadafi’s traditional backing from
powerful tribal leaders also is starting to unravel, analysts said,
marking a potential turning point. Key among them is the Warfallah
tribe, one of Libya’s largest, which is based south of Tripoli. Leaders
announced that they were joining the movement to oust him.

Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2011

Now, as we know, all is fair in love and war. Qaddafi, whose troops
fought side by side with Idi Amin’s in Uganda, was not one to be trifled
with. After having stockpiled billions of dollars in advanced weaponry
from the West, why would he lack the good sense not to use them? Who
cares if he lacked a wide base of support in the country? After all, as
the longest reigning non-monarch on the planet, he had to fight to
preserve his legacy—whatever it was.

Part of the problem is that this was never going to be a fair fight.
Additionally, the lack of political freedom in Libya prevented the kind
of trade union and civic associations to take root in Egypt and that
would play such a key role in toppling Mubarak, Egypt’s Qaddafi. Giving
the lack of a cohesive political leadership and the lack of a strategy,
the revolutionary struggle against Qaddafi would ultimately have to
founder. Today’s Los Angeles Times is brutally frank about the character
of the movement that is now on the run and likely to be liquidated
before long:

For many rebel fighters, the absence of
competent military leadership and a tendency to flee at the first shot
have contributed to sagging morale. Despite perfunctory V-for-victory
signs and cries of “Allahu akbar!” (God is great), the eager volunteers
acknowledge that they are in for a long, uphill fight.

“Kadafi is too strong for us, with too
many heavy weapons. What can we do except fall back to protect
ourselves?” said Salah Chaiky, 41, a businessman, who said he fired his
assault rifle while fleeing Port Brega even though he was too far away
to possibly hit the enemy.

For some on the left, the defeat of people like Salah Chaiky is
apparently something to be celebrated either implicitly or explicitly.
In today’s Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn reminds his readers that
Qaddafi, if not exactly a socialist, was generous to his people—one
supposes in accordance with traditions of noblesse oblige that
reign in feudal societies: “In four decades, Libyans have gone from
being among the most wretched in Africa, to considerable elevation in
terms of social amenities.” Of course, having never shown the slightest
interest in political freedom except when his own ox was being gored,
one can understand why Cockburn can shrug off the fact that torture was
so widespread in Libya that even the Great Leader’s son was forced to
admit:

A foundation run by Libyan leader Moamer
Qadhafi’s son Seif al-Islam catalogued an array of cases of torture,
wrongful imprisonment and other abuses in a report for 2009 published on
Thursday. The Qadhafi Foundation’s report also sharply criticized the
continuing domination of the print and broadcast media by the state. The
few non-state media are all controlled by a publishing company run by
the younger Qadhafi. The report recorded “several flagrant violations”
of human rights in Libya during the year, including “cases of torture
and ill-treatment” as well as a number of “blatant and premeditated
breaches of the law.” The report, distributed to the press, condemned
“all forms of torture” and called for the lifting of the “immunity
granted by laws of exception to employees of various state agencies. “It
also called for a full liberalization of the media in Libya.

Right Vision News, December 13, 2009

But no matter. As long as there is “considerable elevation in terms
of social amenities”, who would want to complain about some malcontent
having his testicles attached to an electric generator. And why blame
Libya for taking part in “extraordinary renditions”? After all, there
was a need to defeat terrorism, as the stalwart Marxists at wsws.org would remind us:

The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),
considered a branch of Al Qaeda, mounted a major challenge to the
Gaddafi regime in the 1990s. The destabilizing impact of that challenge
was a major factor in the decision of the Gaddafi regime to abandon its
traditional anti-imperialist rhetoric and seek an accommodation with
Europe and the United States. As recently as 2007, the Libyan
government, according to reports, was bracing for terrorist attacks.

I must admit that this came as quite a surprise to me. I thought that
the neoliberal policies were a function of the same powerful market
forces that were taking place everywhere in the world. I never would
have suspected that it was al Qaida that drove Qaddafi to cut deals with
Western oil companies so generous that a Houston lawyer would advise
his clients that there were no risks in Libya. Imagine that.

We also learn from Vijay Prashad on Counterpunch that the CIA was
pulling the strings in Libya even before protests began in Tunisa,
months before the Benghazi uprising. (The anti-anti-Qaddafi left seems
to have a difficult time figuring out whether the outside agitators
making life hell in Libya came from Langley, Virginia or Osama
bin Laden’s cave.) Prashad writes:

In December 23, 2010, before the Tunisian
uprising, Boukhris, Charrani and Mansouri went to Paris to meet with
Qaddafi’s old aide-de-camp, Nuri Mesmari, who had defected to the
Concorde-Lafayette hotel. Mesmari was singing to the DGSE and Sarkozy
about the weaknesses in the Libyan state. His man in Benghazi was
Colonel Abdallah Gehani of the air defense corps. But Gehani would not
be the chosen military leader. The CIA already had its man in mind. He
would soon be in place.

Fascinating stuff. If I wrote a screenplay based on this, I’d think
about casting George Clooney as the CIA agent. He’s an old hand at this.

Meanwhile, we learn from Prashad that the revolution was doomed from
the start because Libya is basically two countries, even though some
commentators describe the populations of Tripoli and Benghazi as an
admixture of ethnic groups from east and west: “That east-west divide
smothered any attempt by the working-class in the western cities to rise
to their full potential.”

Silly me. I thought the smothering came from other quarters:

TRIPOLI, Libya — A state of terror has
seized two working-class neighborhoods here that just a week ago
exploded in revolt, with residents reporting constant surveillance,
searches of cars and even cellphones by militiamen with Kalashnikovs at
block-by-block checkpoints and a rash of disappearances of those
involved in last week’s protest.

As rebel fighters in the country’s east
celebrated their defeat of a raid on Wednesday by hundreds of Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi’s loyalists in the strategic oil town of Brega, many
people in Tripoli said they had lost hope that peaceful protests might
push the Libyan leader from power the way street demonstrations had
toppled the strongmen in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.

The climate of fear suggests just how
effectively the government’s ruthless application of force in Tripoli
has locked down the city and suppressed simmering rage, even as the
rebels have held control of the eastern half of the country and a string
of smaller western cities surrounding the capital.

”I think the people know that if they
make any protest now they will be killed, so all the people in Tripoli
are waiting for someone to help them,” one resident said. ”It is easy to
kill anybody here. I have seen it with my own eyes.”

Several people in the two neighborhoods,
Feshloom and Tajura, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of
Colonel Qaddafi’s secret police, said militias loyal to the colonel were
using photos taken at last week’s protest to track down the men
involved. ”They know that there are people who have energy and who are
willing to die, so they pick them up,” another resident said.

New York Times, March 4 2011

Of course, there is always the possibility that the bourgeois press
is simply making things up about repression in Tripoli. Now if we can
only get Saif Qaddafi to admit that he was writing propaganda when he
said there was widespread torture in Libya.

So what does all this amount to? Basically, the anti-anti-Qaddafi
left is straining to fit Libya into a pattern that should be familiar to
us by now. The Benghazi fighters are like the Nicaraguan contras or the
Kurdish rebels who are, as MRZine put it, “traitors” to their country.
It doesn’t matter that the self-appointed (and that is really what they
are) “leaders” of the resistance consulted nobody in the ranks when they
set upon the course of working with imperialism.

The lack of military coordination, as described in the LA Times
above, should give you an accurate sense of the utter disorganisation of
the movement politically. When the Kurds fought against Saddam Hussein,
they had a strong and cohesive organisation that had years of
experience both in the field and in mass struggle.

For all practical purposes, the revolution against Qaddafi began just
one month ago and its flaws are a function of its raw and infant state
rather than the counter-revolutionary instincts of the participants.
Indeed, to make an amalgam between the Benghazi street and the
wheeler dealers on the phone with Langley, Virginia, is an absolute
slander. Here is the real Benghazi street:

On Feb. 17, the scheduled “Day of Rage,”
soldiers and the police opened fire with machine guns on unarmed crowds.
Soon, photographs circulated of bodies torn in half by high-caliber
weapons. Unarmed young men climbed into bulldozers and drove them in
suicidal attempts to breach the high green-and-white walls of the
Katiba, the last stronghold of Qaddafi’s authority left in the city, a
vast compound that dominates Benghazi’s downtown like a medieval fort.
The death toll shot up, and the initial core of politically active
protesters like Saih and his fellow lawyers soon grew to encompass a
broad swath of Benghazi’s roughly 800,000 people.

One of them was Mahdi Ziu. His home was
about 200 yards from the Katiba, and he saw a young man shot to death
right outside his front door. Ziu was anything but an agitator: he
worked as a middle manager at the Arabian Gulf Oil Company. He was a
paunchy man, sedentary and diabetic, with thinning hair and glasses and a
resigned expression. He liked to read and surf the Internet, his
daughter and brother told me. He had a soft heart and often cried when
watching television dramas with his wife and daughter on the living-room
couch. He disliked politics and tended toward moderation in all things:
he would walk away when he heard religious extremists fulminating about
right and wrong at the local mosque. But after three days of brutal
killing in his hometown, something snapped. “He kept saying, ‘Jihad,
jihad, this is the time for us all to go out and fight,’ ” his
21-year-old daughter, Zuhour, told me. Zuhour seemed to alternate
between awe and horror as she quietly narrated her father’s death (his
wife was sequestered, in accordance with Muslim mourning custom). She
sat on a couch in the living room, a slim, pretty girl in a head scarf
with her hands folded uneasily in front of her. The neighbor’s baby
whined in the next room, and a photograph of her father’s face sat on
the table nearby. “If you heard this man,” Zuhour continued, “you would
know he was ready for something.” No one else in the family had taken
part in the protests; Mahdi’s brother told me, a little regretfully,
that he had been too frightened.

By Sunday, Feb. 20, protesters in
Benghazi had armed themselves and were focusing all their efforts on
storming the Katiba. Every day, soldiers inside the barracks were firing
down on the funeral processions that used the long boulevard from the
courthouse to the city’s main cemetery, killing more people and
generating more funerals, more anger.

On Sunday morning, with the sound of
gunfire in the background, Ziu slipped a last will and testament under
the door of a friend. He then returned to his apartment and asked the
neighbors to help him load a number of full gas canisters into his black
Kia sedan, parked just outside the house. They asked why, and he told
them the canisters were leaking; he needed to get them fixed. His
brother, Salem Ziu, told me that he thinks Mahdi used a small patch of
TNT, the kind Libyans use to kill fish, as a detonator. No one really
knows.

What is certain is that about 1:30 p.m.,
Ziu drove his car until it was facing the Katiba’s main gate, near the
police station where the first protests began five days earlier. The
area in front of him was clear, a killing zone abandoned by all but the
most reckless. Rebels fired from the shelter of rooftops and doorways,
and snipers at the Katiba fired occasional shots down on the figures
darting in the streets. Ziu put his foot down on the accelerator. The
guards opened fire, but too late. The speeding car struck the gate and
exploded, sending up a fireball that was captured on a cellphone video
by a protester a few hundred yards away. The blast blew a hole in the
wall, killing a number of guards and sending the rest retreating into
the Katiba. Within hours, it would fall to the protesters.

The remains of Ziu’s charred and crumpled
car now lie by the open gate of the Katiba. Above and around it are
tributes to him in looping spray-painted letters: “Mahdi the Hero.”
“Mahdi, who liberated the Katiba.”

NY Times Sunday Magazine, April 3, 2011

Yes, Mahdi is a hero even if people like Alexander Cockburn and Vijay Prashad would have us piss on his grave.